This week, I wanted to write about Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. It is an important book for what I am trying to do here. Perhaps more than any other, it provides the intellectual collective tissue between the individual “arts of attention” that I am interested in and the collective social and political projects that I think these personal practices can contribute to enhancing.
I realized as I began to write this evening that the excerpts of the book that I brought with me to Istanbul are actually insufficient for my purposes, and that I may need to buy the e-book and spend some more time with it to fully summarize the argument of the book. After all, most of the point of writing this blog is to teach myself the material so that I can recall what I’ve read fluidly in conversation. There are a lot of terms that are defined early in the book that appear regularly in my annotations, which make sense to me, but that I can’t define without recourse to the original passages in the text. At any rate, I’ve tried here to summarize some of the main points of interest.
While Odell’s book is a bit difficult to recap succinctly, the core idea is something like this: the conditions of contemporary society provoke a lot of negative affects, whether because of climate change, political conflict, inequality, or any of the other ills that we know. On top of this, the technologies and social media platforms that are ostensibly meant to bring us closer together have perversely left many feeling more isolated and anxious before. Odell identifies the core driver of this atomization and anxiety as the “attention economy,” or how social media has hijacked our powers of concentration through a variety of ingeniously engineered features that keep us on high alert, tweaked out on Fear Of Missing Out, chasing likes and favs, continually swiping and scrolling until we feel depleted. In response to the abuses the attention economy metes out on our self-esteem, our ability to focus, not to mention our time, many despair. Many would just as soon flee if they could.
But as appealing as a full digital-disconnect and escape to the woods sounds, such a move is actually unsustainable, whether individually or collectively. The historical record shows that this form of resistance has been tried in response to social ills many times in the past. Whether in the case of the Epicureans or the back-to-the-land hippies, this kind of scape doesn’t really seem to work for a variety of reasons. In the case of the Epicureans, their life of contemplation in the garden was only ever meant to be temporary for many who visited, and in any case, the political economy of Ancient Greece is sufficiently different from ours as to render Epicurean retreat somewhat pointless. In the case of the mid-20th century utopians and intentional communalists, more often than not these experiments in living otherwise resulted in reproduction of the same set of issues that people sought to escape—patriarchy, inequality, alienation, etc.—just in microscale. That said, Odell is adamant that some distance—removal and contemplation, as she calls it, drawing on Thomas Merton—is necessary to be able to accurately view our own situations. But, also following Merton, that same removal and contemplation ideally brings us back to our responsibilities to and in the world. Since a “once-and-for-all exit” is not possible for most of us, and in any case likely doomed to fail if history is any guide, what is left is to engage in a move she calls “refusal-in-place,” a kind of hybrid contemplation-participation in the world that begins with “standing apart.” Standing apart is a kind of prefigurative practice, a kind of believing in another world while still living in this one. Engaging in a refusal-in-place by standing apart means that we continue to participate in the world, but in a way that runs counter to the usual mode of doing-and-being in the world. She makes her own point quite well, so I’ll just quote here:
“[w]hat I'm suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human—including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I'm suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I'm suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.” (28)
So while there are myriad systemic abuses to be refused in society presently, Odell’s overall proposal is that as good a place to start as any is the abuse of our attention. For her, the reason for this is because attention is the baseline that underwrites all other meaningful refusals. That is, any kind of disciplined collective action will require a high degree of concentration and focus—literally and metaphorically—to withstand attempts by corporations, institutions, governments, et al. to curb the effectiveness of such action. Moreover, because not everyone in society is on equal footing to be able to make larger refusals of social conditions, attention may be the only resource some are able to withdraw.
So how do we go about refusing the abuse of our attention and retraining our abilities of focus and concentration, individually and collectively? I’m flagging—this is something I do in the evenings after long days of writing for a living, after all—so I think for now I will just leave a choice quote and a to be continued, perhaps for tomorrow, perhaps for next week…
“If we think about what it means to "concentrate" or "pay attention" at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a "movement" to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention the same things and to each other. I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It's not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it's true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to "pay attention," then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter.” (81)